Point Of Betrayal

“And attribute it to who? God? Officially we’re out of the assassination business.”

“I see your point.”

“I don’t care what you see. Just send your people to the rendezvous. And you get underground. Once this goes down, we’ll need you to step in.”

“Fine.”

“And one other thing, Riyadh.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m on to you. I did some checking, found out you’re looking to make a little cash on the side selling Saddam’s chemical and biological agents to the Russian mafia and the Libyan government.”

Riyadh smiled. The spy had been spying on him. The man was boorish, but smart, resourceful. Riyadh couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for the man.

“And what will it cost to buy your silence?”

“We’ll discuss that later. After we finish this op. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will kill me before it’s all said and done.”

“I should hope not,” Riyadh said, not meaning it.

The phone clicked as Stone terminated the call. Riyadh holstered his pistol and went to get his brother.

DRESSED HEAD TO TOE in a black khaki bodysuit and combat boots, Abdullah Riyadh smeared black combat cosmetics to his cheeks and forehead in tight, circular strokes. Then he picked up the Heckler & Koch MP-5, slammed in a magazine and charged the weapon, realizing how it had become an extension of himself. He could field strip it, reassemble it, blindfolded, just as he could countless other weapons. He had learned to enjoy the feel of the weapon, the sense of power it gave him. The American, Chris Doyle, had trained him to handle it, to fight empty-handed. It had taken more than a year, but Doyle and the other Americans had turned Abdullah and his forty-nine comrades, a mixture of defectors and angry patriots, into a tightly knit band of warriors. Unlike Stone, Doyle had taught the men not just to fight, but to survive, to live long enough to enjoy their freedom. Though outwardly tired and cynical, Doyle seemed to care about the men he was teaching.

Hearing footsteps from behind, he whirled and saw the three Americans approaching. Other men, all outfitted in attire similar to Abdullah’s, stopped their preparations and also stared at the trio.

“Okay,” Stone said, “you girls ready to save the world, or what?”

Abdullah ignored him. Instead he looked at Doyle, who flashed a tight smile.

“We are ready to move?” Abdullah asked.

Doyle nodded. “It’s a go.”

ABDULLAH RIYADH CROUCHED beside the tire of a large troop carrier as he lay in wait for the Republican Guard soldier. Fear constricted his lungs, causing them to ache for oxygen as though he’d just run a marathon. He pressed his knees together to keep them from shaking and gripped the knife clutched in his right hand so hard that it caused his knuckles to throb.

Twenty yards away lay a critical target for the mission. Abdullah knew all too well that Saddam’s network of tunnels and bunkers was almost legendary, both inside and outside Iraq. Fewer people knew of the dozen or so well-guarded emergency exits connecting the tunnels to the surface, all of which led into innocuous structures such as small groceries or apartment buildings. If it ever struck Iraqi civilians as odd that Republican Guard soldiers might fortify such seemingly useless structures, Abdullah knew they swallowed their curiosity. Their very survival depended on such compliance.

At his back lay a one-story structure, a former restaurant apparently sagging under its own neglect. The windows and doors were boarded-over and parts of the red-brick exterior had been scorched black by fire. In stark contrast, the structure bristled with security cameras and halogen spotlights, rated the attention and protection of a handful of elite guards.

During the past thirty seconds, another portion of the crew had successfully killed power for the surrounding four blocks, including the target building. According to intelligence and best guesses by the Americans, Abdullah and his group had ninety seconds once the lights went out to cover the open ground surrounding the building and breach its defenses before backup generators restored power, resurrecting alarm systems, security cameras and lights.

Abdullah knew he and his crew were living on borrowed time. During the past five minutes, his teammates, using a lethal mix of knives, garrotes and poisonous darts, had slain ten Iraqi soldiers, each identified as Republican Guard by the red triangle on his shoulder patch. With the area pitched into darkness, Abdullah had donned a pair of night-vision goggles, plunging his world into green. Four more soldiers closing in on the building, all of them Egyptian mercenaries recruited for the job by Jon Stone, were similarly equipped and considerably more dangerous than Abdullah could hope to be.

The soldier cleared his throat. The sound snapped Abdullah from his thoughts, caused his shoulders to tense. Using a handheld television with a tubular camera lens protruding from it, he snaked the lens around the carrier’s front end, caught a glimpse of the soldier. The man stood, staring straight ahead, apparently fixated on a grove of date palms situated fifty yards ahead. The soldier held a wicked-looking SMG in his left hand, its barrel canted at a forty-five-degree angle as he scanned the area.

Abdullah watched as the soldier pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, raised it to his mouth. Setting down the television, the young Arab rose up in a crouch, trying hard not to jostle his MP-5 or other equipment as he did. Blood thundered in his ears, making it harder to hear the soldier’s transmission.

“Position ten,” the soldier said.

A pause, followed by a muffled response reached Abdullah’s ears.

“All clear,” the soldier said.

Relief washing over him, Abdullah snatched up the television, secured it on his belt, listened. The soldier had turned and was moving back toward the main building. Rounding the carrier’s front end, Abdullah fell in behind the soldier, closed the distance between them with just a few steps. Reaching around, digging fingers into the man’s fleshy jowls, he gave his adversary’s head a twist and dragged the knife blade across the man’s throat, severing muscles, tendons and arteries.

Blood spurted from the gash and he went limp, dead before he hit the ground.

Sheathing his knife, Abdullah let the soldier fall into a heap. Folding the man’s arms and legs in on his torso, the young Arab stuffed the soldier underneath the armored troop carrier, bunching his remains behind the tires so he’d be less visible.

Returning to his feet, Abdullah stared at his hands. The warm blood glistened bright green on his palms. His stomach rolled with nausea and his head momentarily grew light as the enormity of his actions struck him. He’d killed a man, willingly, mechanically. For a moment the realization and the physical sensations overshadowed everything else around him.

A voice exploded in his earpiece. “Abdullah! Left!”

The young man whipped around, bringing up the sound-suppressed weapon as he did. He spotted a pair of shadows approaching. Each brandished an assault rifle, the barrel tracking in on Abdullah. Without thinking, he triggered the MP-5, drilled the man closer to him with quick burst to the abdomen. Even as he did, his second attacker fired his own weapon, the muzzle-flash tearing a hole in the darkness, the report shattering the silence. Even as Abdullah tried to process the sounds, recognize them as gunshots, he whirled toward the second attacker. He cut loose with another burst from his weapon, simultaneously felt something grab hold of him, stop him cold. Pain seared through his right arm even as the gunshot registered in his mind. His knees buckled, slammed hard against the concrete.

The soldier, face obscured by night-vision goggles, readjusted his aim. Abdullah willed his arm to rise, realized it no longer responded to his commands. Streams of gunfire ripped through the air overhead, causing him to flinch. A storm of bullets ripped into the Iraqi soldier, pounding him back several steps, burrowing into the man’s body armor, but stopping short of his flesh. Although not mortally injured, Abdullah saw the man whipsawed about by the bullets’ force. Another burst smacked into the man’s face, knocking him backward as though tackled from behind.

A pair of Abdullah’s comrades, both Egyptian mercenaries, raced from the shadows and helped him to his feet while a third stayed behind the troop carrier and laid down cover fire. Weapons chatter and muzzle-flashes erupted around Abdullah. Bullets sizzled just past his head, chewing through concrete and ricocheting off the armored hide of the vehicle at his back.

He felt fingers slip into his shirt collar. Someone dragged him to his feet, roughly.

“Go,” said one of the mercenaries.

Abdullah nodded, backpedaled toward cover. Even as he did, he used his good hand to snatch the Beretta 92-F from his hip, snapped off three shots at another soldier. The first two rounds flew wild, screaming past the man’s head. The third, fueled by sheer luck, drilled into the man’s mouth, tunneled through his spinal cord before exploding from the back of his head.

His arm throbbing, his head lightening with blood loss, Abdullah continued moving. God had smiled on him with that last shot, that much he knew. He triggered the pistol again, watched muzzle-flashes pop lighter green in his field of vision. With the Egyptians’ guidance, he made it behind the large troop carrier.

“You’re okay?” the mercenary asked.

Abdullah nodded. “I can treat this myself.”

“You’re lucky,” the man said. “The bullet came out the other side. But you’re losing a great deal of blood.”

Abdullah waved him away. “Fight. We came here to fight.”

The mercenary grinned. “Yes, we did. And I came here for a paycheck. Unfortunately we find ourselves at odds.”

The man jabbed the barrel of his pistol into Abdullah’s forehead. Abdullah raised a hand to swat it away but never connected. Then his world went black.

Amman, Jordan

TARIQ RIYADH SAT at a table in the corner of the hotel bar, nursed his third whiskey. The hotel catered mostly to Westerners and a pianist tapped out an old jazz standard, the melody competing with the dull din of collective conversation, broken only by an occasional burst of laughter. Riyadh watched as the cigarette pinched between the first two fingers of his right hand, burned down to the filter. Discarding it, he lit another. What the hell? he thought. I have plenty of time.

A big man dressed in a summer-weight navy-blue suit, eyes obscured by a pair of mirrored aviator shades, drifting through the crowd. Clutching a glass mug of amber beer, he approached Riyadh’s table, dropped into a chair without invitation. Anger burned in Riyadh’s face, knotted his stomach, as he stared at the man, who was looking past him at a wall. With his eyes hidden and his mouth set in a neutral line, Jon Stone was as inscrutable as ever.

“They’ve killed more than three hundred,” Riyadh said. “The entire team, except for the mercenaries, are dead. They’ve also been hunting down members of their families, killing the men. I’ve lost four cousins and two nephews within the last week. One of them was twelve”